Last week, for the second year in a row, I had the opportunity to attend as Speaker Smart Utilities Scandinavia in Stockholm, alongside 200 utilities experts. The 2-day event is one of several organized by Synergy, which IDC Energy Insights supports in the guise of Knowledge Partner. Having attended many of the Synergy utility events in the past, including events in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, UK and Ireland and also their European-wide event, which attract over 5,000 industry experts from around the world, I find the Scandinavian to be one of my favorite. The always innovative projects presented are paralleled by open and often heated discussions.

After a very intense 2 days of non-stop presentations, one-on-one meetings, panel discussions, my key takeaways that I bring home from the event are:

The role of the DSO. After many discussions and exchanges, it is now very clear that the role of the DSO is neither permanent nor static, and will have to evolve in order to support the Smart Energy Paradigm of the distant future (maybe not so distant). This evolution in role, however, starts now! And there is a need for clear roles and…

At the end of last year, IDC Energy Insights predicted that analytics would become a serious consideration for utilities in 2013, driven by the growing use of digital devices and sensors generating a growing volume and variety of data - a prediction that was recently confirmed in a survey of utility delegates at our recent Pan-European Utilities Executive Summit. But so far, there has been limited Smart Grid related M&A in the analytics area, with Oracle's acquisition of DataRaker late last year standing out. Although water utilities have typically followed behind energy utilities in moving towards a smarter network, water utilities are increasingly looking to invest in analytics and last week Badger Meter revealed that it has acquired Californian analytics-based software start-up Aquacue for $14 million.

Founded in 2009, Aquacue is still an early stage company; it raised $150,000 in seed funding in 2011 and has yet to reach significant sales. As such, the deal can be considered a major success for both the company and investors. Badger Meter has adopted a strategy of shifting its business from lower cost, manually read meters toward more expensive, value-added AMR, AMI and advanced metering analytics (AMA) systems. The acquisition of Aquacue is in line with this strategy as it will enable new…

Yesterday I was joined by Dan Probst, Chairman of Energy & Sustainability at Jones Lang LaSalle, Darrell Smith, Director of Facilities and Energy at Microsoft, and Jim Young, Founder and CEO of Realcomm Conference Group for a virtual round table discussion of the real world implications of adopting smart building solutions.

Dan, Darrell and Jim bring decades of expertise in the field of technology utilization in commercial and corporate real estate to the discussion of the business implications of deploying smart building technologies. To be clear, our conversation focused on next generation energy management solutions. These smart building technologies are characterized by IT architecture and enable advanced integration and automation of control over energy consuming and producing assets in a facility from…

At the beginning of March, IDC Energy Insights hosted its first Pan-European Utilities Executive Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. The exclusive invitation-only event served as a networking platform for the 40 utility delegates, who openly shared their experiences and challenges to tackle. One of our major goals for the event was bringing together the IT people and the business people, to facilitate the convergence of these two worlds, which are too often non-communicative. This goal was thoroughly met by a delegate distribution of IT (45%) and non-IT (55%).

The major theme of the event was the role of IT in the changing utility landscape, both from the perspective of improving business processes and its potential for enhancing innovation and enabling new business models. Under this umbrella a broad range of topics were discussed, here below are a few of IDC Energy Insights' reflections on the discussions held during the event and some of the key takeaways.

In 2013, European utilities recognize that flexibility will be key to their ability to…